As much as your humble blogger still regards Elizabeth Warren as preferable to Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race, the evidence from her campaign is that she is no progressive, unless you define “progressive” to mean “centrist/Hamilton Project Democrat willing to throw a few extra bones to the average Joe.”

sniperzolis

A particularly ugly revelation came in the Boston Herald. On the one hand, the Herald is far from in the Warren camp, so it is possible that her remarks were taken out of context. But on the other, the Herald would see saber rattling as a plus, which perversely means they’d be less likely to exaggerate her views:

“Our number one responsibility is to protect Americans from terrorism, that’s our job, so being tough on terrorism is enormously important,” said Warren yesterday at a campaign stop in Gloucester.

“We should take nothing off the table, but the facts are still emerging,” the Senate candidate said when asked if she would support military action against Iran.

Huh? Protecting Americans against terrorism is number one? That means it ranks ahead of the rule of law, among other things. And this from a law professor. Glad we got that clear.

mas snippado
If her statement about Iran was just one example, it might simply be a personal departure from an otherwise prototypical “progressive” position. All of Warren’s three brothers served in the military, after all. But we’ve seen other tells that she is more centrist than the liberal fundraising apparatus that has latched on to the Warren product would lead you to believe.

For instance, I’ve had a number of readers ping me, concerned and perplexed to Warren’s response to a question in the Democratic primary debates about Occupy Wall Street:

Click through to the video here and watch starting at 49:50. The question is “What do you think of the Occupy protests and would you join them?” (…) video here

Warren, by contrast, pointedly avoids giving a straight response and goes a bit off the rails. Her first statement is about obeying the law, and several readers took it to mean she was accusing OWS of being a bunch of lawbreakers. She gave the impression that she’s more concerned about whether they play by the rules or not than whether they have real concerns (and those concerns are broader than just bad behavior by banks). Then she talks about how the banks broke the country mortgage by bad mortgage. She may have meant that as part of her “obey the law” message, but it comes off like an effort to save a flubbed opener. Then she says that’s why she wants to run for Senate. In other words, her message, at best, is she doesn’t agree with how OWS is seeking to effect change. They should vote for people like her instead.

major snippage

Mind you, if you are in Massachusetts, I am not telling you not to vote for Warren. I am simply warning you that she is not the Great Progressive Hope. She came to a strongly liberal view on a comparatively narrow set of issues, on how banks have looted customers, based on intensive research. She does not have that depth of expertise on many, if any, of the other topics she opines on. She has surrounded herself with mainstream Democratic advisors, the bulk of them with links to Harvard. 😯 😦 👿 She may wrap her views in populist rhetoric, but I strongly suspect, ex banking reform and other consumer protections, she’ll be far more centrist than most of her enthusiasts anticipate.

Millions of Americans hoped President Obama would nominate Elizabeth Warren to head the consumer financial watchdog agency she had created. Instead, she was pushed aside. As Warren kicks off her run for Scott Brown’s Senate seat in Massachusetts, Suzanna Andrews charts the Harvard professor’s emergence as a champion of the beleaguered middle class, and her fight against a powerful alliance of bankers, lobbyists, and politicians.

Getting ready to head to Occupy Tucson to gather for an invasion of the Tucson city council to try angd get them to call off the Po-Po and to stop writing vagrancy tickets to citizens exercising their first amendment rights…Wish us luck! (who can say no to changito?)

With the just released 🙄 The 99% Declaration, our ruling class has been issued an ultimatum, 🙄 however.

The anti-Wall Street protesters will convene a National General Assembly in Philadelphia from July 4th, 2012 until October of 2012, resulting in a “PETITION OF GRIEVANCES to be submitted to all members of Congress, The Supreme Court and President and each of the political candidates running in the nationwide Congressional and Presidential election in November 2012.” If these grievances are not redressed within one year, the 99% “will organize a third independent political party to run candidates in the 2014 mid-term elections.”

Whereas! Submitted! {DING!}
We Pettitty! Our Grievies! To Congreffs!
AND SCOTUS 😆 AND the PretzelVENT!
via signup on GoogleDocs! By way of Independence Hall!
Next July!
Leave the Hamptons and the Vineyard ALONE!

Oh just shoot me with a musket.
Yah. A real fait accompli Declaration of Independence there.
Check your calenders, Congress, and get back to us.
No RSVP yet from Antonin Scalia.

FUCKING RIDICULOUS.
Classsic Diversion, wedge play, move to co-opt…etc…
Quite aside from the buck fuckin naked move to PHYSICALLY FLEE to Philadelphia, 😆 the abject meme-seizure is there of course too- from demands to grievances,
from the heavy on the “Occupy” and “Wall Street” head set of OWS in situ to the “99% movement” …

Whatever. People (I hope!) will figure it out sooner rather than later when that weak shit doesn’t work.
Problem is…TIMING.
No sense of it from many Leftishers…No rhythm.

So, ya know….OWS….Politics…CRISIS…Demands…

Hint: Who Else into The Void?
Yep, him –
😆 — > Enter DAVID GERGLEN/index.html I mean GERGEN! WHATEVER!

Daimler, the parent of Mercedes-Benz, has dismissed Ernst Lieb, the president and chief executive of the luxury automaker’s American subsidiary.

Daimler announced the move on Monday. The statement, in an e-mail by Florian Martens, senior manager for corporate communications in Stuttgart, Germany, did not explain Mr. Lieb’s dismissal. Mr. Lieb, 56, had held the position since 2006.

The company said Mr. Lieb was succeeded immediately by Herbert Werner, the chief financial officer of Mercedes-Benz USA, who was expected to hold the position “until further notice.”

Automotive News reported that Mercedes had canceled its national dealer meeting scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday in Chicago.

A paper being presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition in Boston looked at the rate of firearm injuries to youths under 20, and found that it is happening much more often than most people believed.

Some 20,600 firearm injuries happen to 0-19 year olds every year, of which 4.5% are fatal. 63% percent of these injuries were intentional; 37% were not.

The number of non-fatal injuries is actually 30% higher than previous estimates, and African American males older than 11 were at a higher risk of coming to the emergency room due to a gun injury.

Despite what many would think about inner city violence, these injury rates were no more common in metropolitan areas than elsewhere. However, the highest percentage was in the South (47%), then the Midwest (34%), the West (14%) and finally the Northeast (5%).

We’re living through a magical moment … #OCCUPYWALLSTREET has catalyzed into an international insurgency for democracy … the mood at our assemblies is electric … people who go there are drawn into a Gandhian spirit of camaraderie and hope for a new kind of future. Across the globe the 99% are marching! You have inspired more than you know. People are digging into Act One of the long Spring.

Its now time to amp up the edgy theatrics … deviant pranks, subversive performances and playful détournements of all kinds. Open your insurrectionary imagination. Anything, from a bottom-up transformation of the global economy to changing the way we eat, the way we get around, the way we live, love and communicate … be the spark that sustains a global revolution of everyday life!

As the movement matures, lets consider a response to our critics. Lets occupy the core of our global system. Lets dethrone the greed that defines this new century. Lets work to define our one great demand.
OCTOBER 29 – #ROBINHOOD GLOBAL MARCH

This is a proposal for the general assemblies of the Occupy movement.

Eight years ago, on February 15, 2003, upwards of 15 million people in sixty countries marched together to stop President Bush from invading Iraq … a huge chunk of humanity lived for one day without dead time and glimpsed the power of a united people’s movement. Now we have an opportunity to repeat that performance on an even larger scale.

On October 29, on the eve of the G20 Leaders Summit in France, let’s the people of the world rise up and demand that our G20 leaders immediately impose a 1% #ROBINHOOD taxon all financial transactions and currency trades. 😯 Let’s send them a clear message: We want you to slow down some of that $1.3-trillion easy money that’s sloshing around the global casino each day – enough cash to fund every social program and environmental initiative in the world.

Take this idea to your local general assembly and join your comrades in the streets on October 29.

Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) — The European Union reached a deal as part of a short-selling law that will pave the way for an optional ban on naked credit-default swaps on sovereign debt.

Poland, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, and lawmakers from the European Parliament reached the accord at a meeting in Brussels yesterday.

Under the deal, traders may be prevented from buying CDS on government bonds unless they either own the sovereign debt or other assets whose price moves in tandem with it. Nations will have the right to opt out of the measure if they detect signs that it may affect their borrowing costs.

“These balanced measures will ensure that sovereign CDS are used for the purpose for which they were designed, hedging against the risk of sovereign default, without putting at risk the proper functioning of sovereign-debt markets,” EU Financial Services Commissioner Michel Barnier said in a statement.

Sounds good but it’s not….all that.
I think, too, that it is a sign of retreat.
(which should be immediately exploited by emboldened, hatchet bearing mobs behind battering ram berzerkers accompanied by well nourished newcomers having just selected from a nice selection of torches, rods pitchforks, hammers, ice picks raw vegetables , hummus, salads and what have you available on a table set up next to the Vegan buffet. …IMO.)

Anyways..while certain EU members put this CDS short selling ban in place in August…the push for the deal (hastened by the riot in Rome IMO) has them picking up the pace in the foot race to the vaults.

NTIM, the bankser bands have carried on, which, while benefitting key insiders no doubt has come at a hammering of their own institutional market value. Which has really fucked over middle management types either set to curb or in their own stock options..Ya, bummer. These and other full-assed last gasp measures have been come, ironically at very sub-prime rates and have been of minimal use to prop up the banks. The crackheads wrote their own huge loophole in the country-specific bans from summer as well as this announced-as- EU-wide deal now. Bankster market values have been getting the hammer nonetheless, uhm *primarily* cuz its STILL turned out they ah, just up and HAVE ya now, Defrauded everybody – there’s that – and them with not enough fuckin money to cover each other’s swaps ~let alone everybody else slamming at the door. Ya, bummer

Heavy Is the Head That Wears Crown
Wall Street Journal – 9 hours ago
By DAN FITZPATRICK Bank of America Corp. relinquished the crown as biggest bank it spent a quarter of a century chasing,

in the latest sign of shifting priorities in the US banking industry.

And that latest sign of shifting priorities in the US banking industry is to save Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, JP Morgan- Chase, , Morgan Stanley, BNY Mellon…. among standing but staggered Wells Fargo and civil litigants massing at USBancorp hide-hole custodial account Derivative others…(tho USBank sued BoA just in August 🙄 : all 3 years later~ Who knew?~like they are the latest digs dugout crew for all the usual suspects )

A quick snapshot…in the last 6 months ~
Critical as its all tied to the Swaps. –

Goldman Sachs has lost 33.5& of its market value.
CitiCorp has lost 32.4% of its market value.
JP Morgan Chase – 25.3% of its market value.
BNY/Mellon has lost 32.2% of its market value.
BarclaysGroup US has lost 32.3% of its market value
HSBC has lost 22.2% of its market value
Met Life has lost 25.2% of its market value

And all the shlemiels here and abroad holding Their Paper? Their Derivatives? Their CDS?
Any idea the Trillions of conjured Dollars plum fuck illuminatied into thin air in such a manner that they now can’t even bullshit each other into a decent coventured IPO underwriting deal, Facebook’s shelved IPO being a prime poo-puff example?

Point being with the scale and scope of these 2008 DWARFING Losses?: Nobody move, nobody sneeze.
They’re in a Difficult Situation™Time to move in and just knock these fuckers over.
No Whereas,
No Wherefore.
Just full-blown Bongo Berzerer on Earth just batter-ramming every
door & plate glass window.

The Tucson City Council meeting last night was cheering, quite a few attorneys showed up and threatened the city council for allowing the police to ticket the protesters, and they councilpeople did not look ill disposed toward the request to stop ticketing. Not being on the agenda (though next week we are) all we could do is rant during the “call to the audience” Not sure if anybody got tickets last night, but some wanker stole a bunch of supplies from the Kitchen 👿

Just back from a coffee run down to the occupation (the evolution WILL be caffeinated 😉 ) and orchestrated…seems to be the feeling amongst the campers. I guess there were three separate raids last night 👿 They seem to feel it doesn’t make sense otherwise; all the street folks there (the drinkers, junkies etc.) are part of the scene now and are getting fed, clothed, and some medical attention too so they aren’t likely suspects…things that make you go hmmm.

Anyhoo, the good news is that while the pigs in blue showed up at 10;30pm last night, they didn’t issue any citations. Dig this crazy joke; I guess rate rather than go to tents and around to the folks sitting up, the called out from the corner, “We’re issuing citations. Does anybody need one?” 😆 There weren’t any takers and the cops took off… 😀 After seeing the attorneys rip the city council new sphincters (one, a good friend is why this hippy and many others aren’t locked up 😉 ) I knew the cops weren’t going to bug us again 😈

all the street folks there (the drinkers, junkies etc.) are part of the scene now and are getting fed, clothed, and some medical attention too so they aren’t likely suspects

That seems to be happening here… and has to… an open encampment on the streets has toincorporate the street scene, and somehow manage it …

We have a pretty rum bunch of Democratic mayors thru Cali so I am expecting more of the San Francisco model, clear them out after dark, and if necessary pick them up and throw them to the ground, hard.

Jay Taber wrote recently on Skookum about having to separate from his partner and their dog, because they can’t qualify for gov’t. assistance there. So they found separate accommodations with friends to avoid homelessness.

Guess it could be worse. I had a “friend of friends” here locally. She lost her coffee shop job and couldn’t find anything else that could pay her bills. The only people who could take her in were her folks, and they were abusers who she’d run away from in the first place. When she had to surrender her pets, she decided it was all over and took sleeping pills. >:

Thanks. There’s going to be huge memorial at the end of the month at greyhound rock just north of Santa Cruz, so at least I’ll have that to help process this gaping wound. Bam Bam saved my life three times (not to mention saving me from “banning” when I first showed up at a gathering thinking I was Jim Morrison)

Sorry about your friend, too I’ve lived long and hard enough to have a few friends take this route, and its so difficult for me to get over the anger part, the sadness the comes in afterwards seems a balm in comparison.

…incorporate the street scene, and somehow manage it that’s definitely true but like the Rainbow Gatherings (a essential root of the non-“organizational” structure of the Occupations, IMHO, and demonstrably a part of the “personel”, 😆 , since the inception on 9/17in NY and everywhere after) EVERYONE is welcome and needed, their voice, their experience/pain is part of 99/ the rainbow/human family (as much as a bs come on as that may seem to some, it’s not)…so while there have to be and definetely are strategies to handle those who are hard to handle (how I love our mature sisters! Those chicks ( ) are SMARTER, that’s right!) the hard are not only welcomed, but actually WANTED…not that you were implying otherwise, I’m just sayin 😉

P.S. for the most part, but there are some fucked egos in T-town , the nameless (though well videoed and visible 😡 ) who talked about “banning” this “nutcase or that one” since before they started 😡 , but they’ve backed away from trying that after a few of us “unloaded both barrels” on them 😈 I and I mosh up any backra bulbucker babylonian bullshit artist! 😆

and I was not. The ONLY thing I am saying is there is a dangerous element, in all strata of society. Nothing more. I used to be sent to the local BofA, way way way back 35+ years ago, iwth the cash deposits for the law firm I worked at. 29,999,99, pretty much, for 3 accounts, each just under 10,000 of course. Drug defense firm, among other things. I did pass the most hard core that hang out around Civic Cneter here…. I was not personally afraid, I am a city person, it waws daylight I knew which side of which streets to walk on and so forth… but I would make my mind blank as to what I had in my little brown lunch bag.

Bill Kristol : Author, Big Jew
America: Isn’t it Time to Build The HUGE Glass Dome & Satellite Based Magnifying Lens Network Over Potential Anti-Zionist Opponents To Just Fry Them All Like Little Bugs?

hmm I hunted this up to send someone… and realised I never posted it here…

[A]ccording to one person who has toured the center, there are three rows of computer workstations, with approximately two-thirds operated by non-NYPD personnel. The Chief-Leader, the weekly civil service newspaper, identified some of the outside entities that share the space: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, the Federal Reserve, the New York Stock Exchange. Others say most of the major Wall Street firms have an on-site representative. Two calls and an email to Paul Browne, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, seeking the names of the other Wall Street firms at the center were not returned. An email seeking the same information to City Council Member, Peter Vallone, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, was not returned.

In a press release dated October 4, 2009 announcing the expansion of the surveillance territory, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly had this to say:

“The Midtown Manhattan Security Initiative will add additional cameras and license plate readers installed at key locations between 30th and 60th Streets from river to river. It will also identify additional private organizations who will work alongside NYPD personnel in the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, where corporate and other security representatives from Lower Manhattan have been co-located with police since June 2009. The Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center is the central hub for both initiatives, where all the collected data are analyzed.”

The project has been funded by New York City taxpayers as well as all U.S. taxpayers through grants from the Federal Department of Homeland Security. . . . . .

These last weeks, there have been two “occupations” in lower Manhattan, one of which has been getting almost all the coverage — that of the demonstrators camping out in Zuccotti Park. The other, in the shadows, has been hardly less massive, sustained, or in its own way impressive — the police occupation of the Wall Street area.

On a recent visit to the park, I found the streets around the Stock Exchange barricaded and blocked off to traffic, and police everywhere in every form (in and out of uniform) — on foot, on scooters, on motorcycles, in squad cars with lights flashing, on horses, in paddy wagons or minivans, you name it. At the park’s edge, there is a police observation tower capable of being raised and lowered hydraulically and literally hundreds of police are stationed in the vicinity. I counted more than 50 of them on just one of its sides at a moment when next to nothing was going on — and many more can be seen almost anywhere in the Wall Street area, lolling in doorways, idling in the subway, ambling on the plazas of banks, and chatting in the middle of traffic-less streets.

This might be seen as massive overkill. After all, the New York police have already shelled out an extra $1.9 million, largely in overtime pay at a budget-cutting moment in the city. When, as on Thursday, 100 to 150 marchers suddenly headed out from Zuccotti Park to circle Chase Bank several blocks away, close to the same number of police — some with ominous clumps of flexi-cuffs dangling from their belts — calved off with them. It’s as if the Occupy Wall Street movement has an eternal dark shadow that follows it everywhere.

At one level, this is all mystifying. The daily crowds in the park remain remarkably, even startlingly, peaceable. (Any violence has generally been the product of police action.) On an everyday basis, a squad of 10 or 15 friendly police officers could easily handle the situation. There is, of course, another possibility suggested to me by one of the policemen loitering at the Park’s edge doing nothing in particular: “Maybe they’re peaceable because we’re here.” And here’s a second possibility: as my friend Steve Fraser, author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, said to me, “This is the most important piece of real estate on the planet and they’re scared. Look how amazed we are. Imagine how they feel, especially after so many decades of seeing nothing like it.”

And then there’s a third possibility: that two quite separate universes are simply located in the vicinity of each other and of what, since September 12, 2001, we’ve been calling Ground Zero. Think of it as Ground Zero Doubled, or think of it as the militarized recent American past and the unknown, potentially inspiring American future occupying something like the same space. (You can, of course, come up with your own pairings, some far less optimistic.) In their present state, New York’s finest represent a local version of the way this country has been militarized to its bones in these last years and, since 9/11, transformed into a full-scale surveillance-intelligence-homeland-security state.

Their stakeout in Zuccotti Park is geared to extreme acts, suicide bombers, and terrorism, as well as to a conception of protest and opposition as alien and enemy-like. They are trying to herd, lock in, and possibly strangle a phenomenon that bears no relation to any of this. They are, that is, policing the wrong thing, which is why every act of pepper spraying or swing of the truncheon, every aggressive act (as in the recent eviction threat to “clean” the park) blows back on them and only increases the size and coverage of the movement.

Though much of the time they are just a few feet apart, the armed state backing that famed 1%, or Wall Street, and the unarmed protesters claiming the other 99% might as well be in two different times in two different universes connected by a Star-Trekkian wormhole and meeting only where pepper spray hits eyes.

Which means anyone visiting the Occupy Wall Street site is also watching a strange dance of phantoms. Still, we do know one thing. This massive semi-militarized force we continue to call “the police” will, in the coming years, only grow more so. After all, they know but one way to operate.

Right now, for instance, over crowds of protesters the police hover in helicopters with high-tech cameras and sensors, but in the future there can be little question that in the skies of cities like New York, the police will be operating advanced drone aircraft. Already, as TomDispatch regular Nick Turse indicates in his groundbreaking report, the U.S. military and the CIA are filling the global skies with missile-armed drones and the clamor for domestic drones is growing. The first attack on an American neighborhood, not one in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, or Libya, surely lurks somewhere in our future. Empires, after all, have a way of coming home to roost. Tom

America’s Secret Empire of Drone Bases
Its Full Extent Revealed for the First Time
[well, I have a hard time imagining that anyone who cares, has a full grasp, given the overwhelming nanosecond technology of the MIC death cult, .. nonetheless, I do appreciate the concern and effort to track the death cult – diane]

continuing my last post (by the way of which, I had meant to include: that
I hadn’t included the ‘hyperlinks,’ there are quite a few (best to go to the source).)

Predators, Reapers, and Sentinels are just part of the story. At Beale Air Force Base in California, Air Force personnel pilot the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an unmanned drone used for long-range, high-altitude surveillance missions, some of them originating from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam (a staging ground for drone flights over Asia). Other Global Hawks are stationed at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, while the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio manages the Global Hawk as well as the Predator and Reaper programs for the Air Force.

Other bases have been intimately involved in training drone operators, including Randolph Air Force Base in Texas and New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base, as is the Army’s Fort Huachuca in Arizona, which is home to “the world’s largest UAV training center,” according to a report by National Defense magazine. There, hundreds of employees of defense giant General Dynamics train military personnel to fly smaller tactical drones like the Hunter and the Shadow. The physical testing of drones goes on at adjoining Libby Army Airfield and “two UAV runways located approximately four miles west of Libby,” according to Global Security, an on-line clearinghouse for military information.

Money talks, but not loud enough for the 99%. By circulating dollar bills stamped with fact-based infographics, Occupy George informs the public of America’s daunting economic disparity one bill at a time. Because money knowledge is power.

The Obama campaign has more than $60 million cash on hand. In an economy this bad, you’d think a presidential campaign that flush would be happy to pay good money for a talented designer to create a campaign poster.

But the folks at Obama campaign have taken a page from the Arianna Huffington book of economic exploitation and called on “artists across the country” to create a poster … for free.

And here’s the kicker. It’s a jobs poster.

Yes, the Obama campaign is soliciting unpaid labor to create a poster “illustrating why we support President Obama’s plan to create jobs now, and why we’ll re-elect him to continue fighting for jobs for the next four years.”

If you win? You get: A framed copy of your own poster, signed by the president (“approximate retail value $195”).

And if you don’t win? Well, that’s too bad. You’ve not only lost the contest, you’ve also surrendered your intellectual property. “All submissions will become the property of Obama for America,” according to the fine print.

It’s been a rough few weeks for the city’s billionaires, bankers and corporate board members.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement has gained steam, the city’s well-heeled have become the target of protests aimed at embarrassing them in their neighborhoods or places of business. Drawing on tactics honed by labor unions, the protesters have visited restaurants, theaters and luxury apartment buildings to deliver pointed messages to some of the city’s most notable power brokers.

Protesters have infiltrated an eatery run by Danny Meyer, who sits on the board of Sotheby’s, the art auction house that has locked out workers for almost three months; and showed up at the home of Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, which has been targeted for its mortgage practices.

“People who sit in board rooms and only deal with people of a certain social strata don’t necessarily feel or see the impact of their decisions,” said Jason Ide, president of Teamsters Local 814, which represents Sotheby’s workers. “We want to make sure they get the message very clearly, that people are suffering because of what they’re doing.”

Last week, protesters visited the homes of Mr. Dimon, billionaire businessman David Koch, financier Howard Milstein, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and hedge fund maven John Paulson as part of a so-called Millionaires March to call for an extension of the state income-tax surcharge on high earners, which is set to expire at the end of the year.

On Saturday, the Alliance for a Greater New York and Occupy Wall Street teamed up to launch occupytheboardroom.org, a website that lists the names of 200 top executives and board members from Bank of America Corp., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. “Just got evicted while your banker gets bonuses?” the site asks. “Share your special story with someone who ought to know.”

Occupy the Boardroom encourages users to click on the bankers’ names and send them personal letters, which are collated on the site. By Tuesday afternoon, the project had already been tweeted nearly 3,000 times and shared on more than 8,000 Facebook pages. More than 88,000 page views from 161 countries had been tallied, and more than 5,000 letters had been submitted.

Even Gawker has gotten into the act in recent days, posting the cell phone numbers of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Citigroup CEO Vikrim Pandit and urging readers to share tales of economic woe.

The protesters have drawn some criticism for singling out individuals and for interrupting New Yorkers’ meals and theater experiences.

“I don’t know what they gain by personal attacks against wealthy individuals,” said George Arzt, a veteran political consultant. “I think their anger has to be put into some positive policy changes rather than into ad hominem attacks at bankers and other wealthy individuals.”

Oh I think that’s definitely a sign to be hung in any forthcoming Citi kidnapees and Goldman Sachs snatchees powder room ensuite in the safe house.

You know, Cleanliness!

A copy of Bill Bennett’s Book of Virtue’s in the bathroom too.
With Bill Bennett IN THERE duct taped to a chair next to the commode, commanded to read it 24/7 aloud whenever Blankie or Dimon, or Vikram or Larry Summers or any of Rubin’s crew can’t hold out any longer and try in vain to go in for a nice quiet shit before returning to their sparse bunks in the room where the sole, cruel, remnant evidence of human life blares from a large white plastic television, set on loop to the speeches of Joe Biden, spanning his Opus of the last 30 years….

Enh, I’m thinkin Opus needs to be changed to “Oeuvre.”
Said the one guard to the other.“Not that it matters” came the reply..“When they scream to change the tape, we can THen pop in Biden’s “Oeuvre”, which is actually goin on 40 years now.”

So.

At Thursday's debate, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren defended their Medicare for All plan. They faced criticism from several rivals, including Senator Amy Klobuchar, who described it as a "bad idea," and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who claimed the bill shows Sanders and Warren do not "trust the American people."

At the third presidential primary debate in Houston, Texas, senator and 2020 candidate Elizabeth Warren called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Warren also spoke about her stance on U.S. trade policy and how "our trade policy in America has been broken for decades."

After being questioned about the crisis in Venezuela, Senator Bernie Sanders defended his vision of democratic socialism. "I agree with what goes on in Canada and in Scandinavia: guaranteeing healthcare to all people as a human right. I believe that the United States should not be the only major country on Earth not to provide paid family and medical le […]

Debate moderator Jorge Ramos of Univision grilled former Vice President Joe Biden over the Obama administration's deportation record. Biden refused to answer whether he did anything to prevent Obama from deporting a record 3 million people.

A U.S. House of Representatives panel on Friday demanded internal emails, detailed financial information and other company records from top executives of Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc, Apple Inc, and Alphabet Inc's Google, widening the antitrust probe of Big Tech.

U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Friday asked a government watchdog to look into the Trump administration's decision to launch an antitrust probe into four automakers cooperating with California on tighter greenhouse gas emissions limits that Trump is trying to eliminate.

A lawyer for former FBI official Andrew McCabe pressed U.S. prosecutors on Friday to drop their politically sensitive case against him, citing reports that suggest they may be having trouble securing criminal charges.

Media

from Howl

I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

October 7 1955

"a remarkable collection of angelson one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure

Democrats…

Same as goddam fucking forever.
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.